Me, Alice: The Autobiography of Alice Cooper

That night at dinner we had another surprise birthday party for Butchie. Butchie was Frankie’s nickname when we wanted to bust his chops. Frankie hated being called Butchie, and we only did it to him in crowded restaurants. After dinner an enormous three-tiered Viennese chocolate cake was wheeled into the room, and we all started singing “Happy Birthday Butchie” to him. Frankie turned bright red when the rest of the restaurant joined in. Frankie almost got the cake on his lap — as planned — but he tipped it over on my lap before we could even finish singing. They don’t call Fast Frankie fast for nothing. Munich. Let me tell you about Munich. We were all crazy about the city. We never even make any money when we play there. It sometimes costs us money to play Munich, but we go just the same. We’ve all had great times in that city. We fell in love twice a night in Munich. I always thought that the whole reason we went to Europe was so we could have a party in Munich.

As long as we were going to play a city where we didn’t make any money, I figured we might as well do the show someplace different and interesting; the Circus Korona was the place. The Circus Korona is the home of European Circus, where Circus is still a great art. It’s the arena where only the best acts in the world are invited to play, and it seemed a terrific venue for Alice Cooper to play.

The night of the show I was leaving my hotel to get into my limousine and out from the shadows came a pathetic hunchback deaf and dumb man with a photo album of me. He was so cool. He played the whole scene all over again, as if he never saw me before. I said to him, “You don’t happen to have a brother in Vienna, do you?” We took him to the show with us again and to the party afterwards, too. It was so much fun to watch him a second time I hope he shows up in Chicago.

The show was terrific. The band played from a tiny little balcony a hundred feet above me and the Circus atmosphere really turned us on to giving an extraordinary performance. What the smell of sawdust won’t do to me! We even had a royal visitor come to see us. The Princess of Saxon turned up (whoever she is) with a lot of flag waving and fanfare and pomp and bowing. But I don’t think she enjoyed the show.

Later we had the party at Tiffany’s that we had all been waiting for. Tiffany’s is my favourite nightspot in Europe. It’s a fabulous restaurant and discotheque, and every girl in the place is prettier than the next. The food’s good, too. Fantasies about things like that never turn out to be as good as the reality, but we all had a ball at Tiffany’s. The party was everything we hoped it would be. We saw the very same girls we had dreamed about for the past three years, and it was like Shangri-La; they were still young and beautiful. Not a sagging tit in the bunch. We even got my hunchback friend a girl for the evening by telling everybody he was an important part of the show!

The next morning I woke up to the terrible news: I had to leave Munich immediately. We weren’t going to be able to spend another leisurely day and night in the city. I had been invited to appear on the Russell Hardy show, the British version of Johnny Carson, and it was important enough for me to fly to England for the taping. Without much groaning I packed my dart gun in my shoulder holster and we left for the airport to board the AC-II.

I was sitting in a private waiting room with the entire touring party, waiting for the authorities to finish a standard luggage search, when eight men in dull gray-green uniforms goose-stepped into the room. The second I saw those dull, gray-green uniforms and little gold eagles I knew I wasn’t going to like these guys. If I was in a Hollywood movie I would have dressed the bad guys just like that.

One of them marched right over to me and said, “Passport, please!”

“We’ve been through all that already,” I told him. “We’re just waiting for them to complete the luggage check.”

“Don’t ask questions. Just give us your passports.”

Another yelled, “Passport, please! Line up here!” We lined up and filed by their grey-green little eyes and turned over books. Some of them took guard at the exits and the rest left the room. We sat there, all of us, staring at the walls and wondering what was going on.

We knew it wasn’t a drug bust. There’s a house rule with us and that’s no drugs — booze only. (And plenty of it.) Libert went up to one of the guards and told him just that. He suggested that if it was because of drugs we were being held, they could tear the plane apart and not find as much as an aspirin. But the guards just stared straight ahead, as if Libert wasn’t even there.

An hour went by. Two. People started to crack from the tension. One of the crew members started calling the guards Nazis and insisted he be taken to the American Consulate. Libert was so frustrated he was running around like a chicken without a head.